Housman Lecture 2019: Victoria Wohl

“The sleep of reason: the psyche and the subject in ancient Greece”

Freud tracked the psyche along the paths of sleep, following the “royal road” of dreams. For the ancient Greeks, too, the psyche was revealed in sleep, not through the semiotics of dreams but through the peculiar state of being we occupy while asleep. Twinned with thanatos in art and literature, hupnos afforded a living experience of death, as Heraclitus writes: “A man kindles a light for himself in the night when his eyes are extinguished. While he is alive, he touches the dead in his sleep; waking, he touches the sleeper” (fr. B26 D-K). What does that nocturnal “touch” allow us to grasp about our nature as human beings? For Heraclitus and his contemporaries, sleep affords us rare contact with the psukhê, that “living image of eternity” within us that becomes active when our bodies and minds rest (Pindar fr. 131b M-S).